A Foreign Service Spouse Photoblog

14 february 2011

also, in case they take the link down, the text from the times of india:

Calendar boys of ChennaiTNN, Feb 11, 2011, 05.26am IST

Tags:Paul Cohn|Mike Edward|Miguel Chao|Abigail Aronson

CHENNAI: It is a challenge that has the US state department stumped. The consular office in Chennai has 10 spouses, all male, trailing their partners posted in Chennai. And the home-bound husbands are wondering what to do since they no longer have a regular job.

But even before the officials could come up with a solution, the husbands got together and decided to capture their lives on a desktop calendar. The Real Husbands of Chennai’ shows the men as they go about their daily routine when their spouses are at work.

You have Nasaa Dorjjugder playing pool, Miguel Chao vacuuming the house while minding his daughter and Rahul Nandi on the phone. Mike Edward has chosen to be captured by the pool while Paul Cohn is busy photographing his dog. Rick Arnold barbecues, Allan Whitehead nurses a glass of wine in front of his computer, Anandaroopa carries shopping bags and Kihyok Ki exercises and keeps his daughter entertained. There is also Joe Clymer, who is back in the US, in time for the snowfall in December.

“If you look at the photos, it also shows the work we do,” says chief photographer Cohn. He is the July man and Cohn is not just indulging in his hobby, photography, but ensuring that his dog gets some exercise too. “It is not easy for men or women to trail their spouses. I fell in love with Abigail and married her knowing that she is in the foreign services,” says Cohn, a professional photographer and Harvard-alumnus, who left a full-fledged public administration career back in Washington DC.

While Cohn trailed wife Abigail Aronson, manager of fraud prevention programme, to Albania and later to Chennai, for Anandaroopa, former investment banker, this is the sixth posting’ with his partner Bryan Dalton, chief of consular services. “When I came there were only tea groups and baby days for wives. What could I do?,” asks Anandaroopa, who is an animal rights activist.

Later, he met Rahul Nandi, who now runs his own software company. Soon Cohn joined them for lunches. “We discussed everything from where to get good bread to the best place for golf,” says Nandi, whose wife Aileen is the commercial attache. “Our wives have fancy titles but we also have our individual skills. During these lunch meetings we came up with many fun ideas,” says Nandi.

And one of the first was to create a calendar featuring the group which had grown to a solid 10 with the name Husbands of Chennai’ (HOC). “We decided to have a calendar from March to December, a Valentine’s Day surprise to our spouses,” says Anandaroopa.

The calendar is not all fun, says consul general Andrew Simkin. In a note accompanying the slick desktop calendar priced at Rs 400, Simkin says that the increasing number of HOCs represents an exciting new challenge to the foreign service. “Behind the humour and cheeky pictures of the HOCs lie policy challenges,” he adds.

And as Cohn and Anandaroopa say, the challenges start with taking care of children, running a house, handling the staff, dealing with shopkeepers and autowallahs and answering the inevitable question from everyone: “What do you do?”